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Apple ‘Ripping Off Taxpayers’ With Green Technology
Man blasted by CEO: ‘He attacked his own investors. I was embarrassed for him’
WND
Apple CEO Tim Cook made worldwide headlines last week by blasting a questioner at a company shareholder meeting and insisting that his company will continue investing huge sums of money in green technologies whether it improves the bottom line or not.
“If you want me to do things only for (return-on-investment) reasons, you should get out of this stock,” said an angry Cook.
Now the man who asked the questions says Cook lashed out at him because it’s obvious the company would be losing hundreds of millions of dollars with their green projects if taxpayer-funded subsidies weren’t defraying much of the cost and because Cook knows the projects are not going to create profits for Apple or its shareholders.
The confrontation took place Friday at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting. In the question and answer session, Justin Danhof of the National Center for Public Policy Research confronted Cook about the huge amount of money spent in the company’s quest to derive 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources.
“I asked him a very basic business question that any investor or any shareholder of Apple would want to know. When you engage in environmentalism … is there a reasonable return on investment? Are you spending more than you’re saving? Cook first answered by saying, ‘I think that it makes economic sense, but even if it didn’t, we would still spend to our heart’s content all of your shareholder money on battling this terrible concept of CO2 emissions,’” Danhof said.
Danhof then asked Cook what the company policy would be if the federal government were not footing the bill for much of its green-energy programs through taxpayer-funded subsidies. That’s when Cook made headlines.
“That’s where he went off the rails. Cook refused to answer the question, and he looked directly at me and said, ‘I don’t care what you think. We’re going to continue to cure blindness.’ What does one have to do with the other? Obviously, Cook was deflecting the issue because, while the company may be engaging in a lot of environmental efforts, the answer is they’re engaging so they can make a profit off the American taxpayer. We’re the ones, John and Jane Q. Taxpayer, that are subsidizing all these solar plants that Apple is putting up in North Carolina and Arizona and California and elsewhere. That’s the real heart of it,” he said.
Reposted with permission
